Democracy Now! uses WikiLeaks ammunition on the front lines in
Cancún

Abstract

The ferocity with which powerful interests are attacking WikiLeaks
and Julian Assange provides a hint about the potency of the information
that WikiLeaks has been publishing. Democracy Now! has been both doing
an excellent job of covering the ongoing WikiLeaks affair while at the
same time using that information to agitate for justice at the 2010
United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 16) in Cancún. All of this provides a
valuable window into how power operates and responds to threats.

Over the past week, Amy Goodman has been reporting for Democracy Now!
on the 2010
United Nations Climate Change Conference
(COP 16) in Cancún,
Mexico, which came to a close last Friday, December 10. She has pressed some
of the powerful leaders present at the conference with some bold questions,
supplied in part with information provided by cables that WikiLeaks
continues to publish. While in Cancún, the majority of their featured
coverage has been about the COP 16 conference, although
they have still aggressively covered news surrounding the activities of
WikiLeaks. The WikiLeaks affair, including information that that
organization has revealed such as what Goodman has used at
COP 16, has connected a surprising number of dots across
the world.

Action taken to mitigate Global Warming will likely be enormously
expensive, requiring great sacrifice. As one of the only nonparticipants in
the Kyoto
Protocol, the United States has been a huge impediment to
international progress on Global Warming. As a result, they have been under
pressure from environmental activists to show significant movement on this
and other issues. A year ago, at the COP 15 conference in
Copenhagen, participants managed to strike a deal called the Copenhagen
Accord on the last day of the conference. This agreement is not
legally binding, but it did give Barack Obama something to point to and
claim “[w]e've
come a long way but we have much further to go.”

There’s a great deal of discussion here, inside and outside the
summit, about the kind of coercion that goes on either to get nations to
sign on to the accord or to punish those who won’t, like Bolivia and
Ecuador. The question has been going back and forth: is it bribery or
democracy?

Stern categorically refused to comment about the fact that
WikiLeaks was publishing these documents, but with respect to the charge of
bribery, he said that “we can eliminate any cause for accusation of
bribery by eliminating any money.” Amy tried to follow up,
“[w]hat about the countries that were punished then, Bolivia, Ecuador,
for not signing?”, but Stern asked to move to another question from a
different journalist.

A dead man can't leak stuff. This guy's a traitor, he's
treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States. And I'm
not for the death penalty, so... there's only one way to do it:
illegally shoot the son of a bitch.

As
Glenn Greenwald so stridently warns, this sort of oppression
naturally spreads to other news outlets: “Joe
Lieberman suggested that not only Assange, but also The
New York Times, may have committed crimes by publishing these
cables”. The interests of the powerful are all connected, and
powerful suppression will target anything that provides a meaningful
challenge to any of those interests.